I would agree that many are support now. I have had a lot of luck with
Toshiba. They seem to have more models that have compliant components.
If you want a serious development laptop, Look at the X505 series. I
ordered one with a quad core i7 series with hyperthreading 6 GB ram, 64
GB solid state and 320 GB HDs. It acts like 8 processors to linux.
Using the -j8 fage for make this makes compiles go real fast in most
cases... The only catches were having to load the Nvidia drivers and
having to install the Realtek wireless driver from their site. The
Nvidia is not opensource but works well. The Tealtek is distrubuted as
source but not sure on licensing. Can't remember off the top of my
head. Everything else worked out of the box with Lenny. I did use the
backports 2.6.30 kernel though... Even things like the webcam worked
with no issues....

Robert
Stefan Monnier wrote:

So, it appears that, in Western Australia, neither laptop computers, nor
desktop computers, are available, that are new, that are compatible with
Linux, and that are reasonably priced (under 1100 AUD), and that can do what
I want (including 1240x1024 graphics resolution).

Don't about Western Australia, but there are nowadays some computers you
can buy which come natively with support for GNU/Linux.
Other than Dell, I'll mention the Lemote machines (hard to get outside
of China, tho, in my experience), the Fit-PC2, the TouchBook, ...
Stefan